Out of the Furnace's Casey Affleck Explains Why Not All Actors Are Rich

In Scott Cooper’s newest thriller, Out of the Furnace, Casey Affleck plays Rodney, the troubled brother of an ex-con (Christian Bale), who gets embroiled in a dangerous crime ring fresh off his tour of duty in Iraq. Set in an economically depressed stretch of the Rust Belt, the film explores both the primal bonds of family and the trauma of war. Krista Smith spoke with Affleck about how he prepared to play a P.T.S.D.-struck veteran, why even some successful actors have to struggle, and why he and Joaquin Phoenix never expected anyone to believe I’m Still Here was a real documentary.

When I went to your screening of Out of the Furnace,I thought, Why don’t I see Casey Affleck more? I want to see you in more movies.

That’s a really nice thing to say. I’ve gotten to do a few roles where I thought, If I could just do this one part, I’d never ask for anything else again. But it’s a bit like saying, “Let me just get through this day and I’ll never drink again.” You always immediately want more.

What about this character dragged you out of your house?

The first thing that sort of lured me out of my cave, I guess, was that it had a really simple great conflict at the heart of it. He had some things that he had seen or done. Some secrets that he couldn’t talk about.

How did you prepare for the role?

You hear a lot about what it’s like for a soldier. The part that was a mystery to me was what it was like to come home. I started to reach out to some of these veteran organizations and they were incredibly helpful. Some of their spokesmen were people from World War II, Vietnam, or younger guys that served in Iraq, Afghanistan. And the thing was, they all had the same story, more or less. It was the same bug, but some of them just got it worse. Pretty quickly, I started to feel the same sense of betrayal. Why is it like this? Why do they come back and why are they so let down? Why is there so little support? No one gives a shit, really. That’s a callous way of saying it, but even if they do give a shit, it’s hard for them to hear. They don’t want to hear about the person that you killed or the kid you by accident shot in the head.

How was it working with Christian Bale?

Everyone is always speaking in hyperbole about other actors, but he’s amazing, man. Working on the scenes with him, I felt redirected and given purpose again. And the acting, which can so often feel something other than dignified, felt dignified and really exciting. I loved it.

I know you were just working on Interstellar with director Christopher Nolan. Can you give me some insight on him?

That guy is something else. Remember that old video of Bobby Fisher going down the row—he’s playing 30-to-1, and he just walks down the aisle moving the pieces, sort of half-distracted, and just beats all of them? Nolan is a little bit like that. It looks like a walk in the park, but if you look really closely he’s making all these great decisions.

Do you have any desire to get into directing? I know you did a movie with Joaquin, but that was different.

I noticed that you discussed recovering from that experience in The New York Times.

I can’t speak for anyone else involved, but I think we thought there might be another way to make a movie, using bits of “reality” and blending it with bits of total fiction. In general, when you’re making a movie, all you’re doing is trying to fool each other that the scene is really happening. Whether you’re in a fight with your wife or you’re sleeping with someone, you’re always just trying to fool yourself into thinking this is real and ignore the three dozen crew members with tool belts and bored expressions. Deception—deceiving yourself, deceiving your scene partner—is how acting often happens. If the actor and the filmmaker don’t believe it, the audience definitely won’t. Joaquin was willing to stay in character all the time, and in some cases let people believe he really was this incredibly obnoxious, offensive, abusive, ignorant character. But isn’t that what makes a film engaging sometimes? The suspension of disbelief? The atmosphere, created by Joaquin’s incredible, uninterrupted commitment to the character, and the documentary style of some of the sequences in public places, made people feel it was all real, no matter how often we reminded them it wasn’t.

We wanted to support this insane character and not have the audience receive him with the distance of satire, but lean in because of the appearance of reality. But only while they were in the theater; it was never the intention to actually trick people! We weren’t laughing at our audience. The only person we were laughing at was Joaquin’s character! But people felt like they were being tricked and they were being laughed at, and they had a very bad reaction to it, and that ended up hurting the movie. But I’m not sure there’s anything different that could have been done. At the release of the film, we both went on national talk shows and said the film was fiction, from top to bottom. We said Joaquin was just performing. I guess we didn’t say that loud enough or quick enough or often enough. Because the whole thing was such an absurd circus, we kind of figured it would be obvious, and we didn’t want to talk down to a very savvy and sophisticated culture of media consumers. Instead, we carefully, diligently played against the absurdity and aimed for believability.

I guess, in the end, whatever blowback there was, and however poorly the film performed at the box office, is my fault for that miscalculation. However, if it said in that New York Times article that it was met with terrible reviews, I don’t think that’s fair. I remember seeing a poster that had some very nice quotes from some people I really respect. But it’s possible that most people hated it. I am sure some did. It’s hard to make a movie that everyone loves.

Let’s talk about Gus Van Sant. How influential has he been to you?

He’s now one of my closer friends. It started when I was 18, and I’ll never forget going down to read for him the first time. It was an entirely different experience. He didn’t videotape it. He didn’t keep saying stupid things or just have me do it over and over and give bad direction. He just sat there, took my picture with some old camera, and then we talked about other things, and I realized, Oh, he’s just trying to get to know me. That’s sort of what’s important to him. And then he just gave me the part. When you work with Gus, he very, very rarely gives any direction. I think he just trusts his instincts of I’ve cast this person because of who they are, and then I’m going to let them make those decisions. If the actor wants to do it one way, and he sort of imagined it working better another way, he’ll just re-orient the whole scene so that what the actor’s doing fits into what his vision is. It’s not in a manipulative way; it’s just in a way of, like, honoring everybody’s input. It’s making sure the actor is doing what they want and he’s getting what he wants, and it usually ends up amounting to something that’s interesting to watch.

You’re always interesting to watch. Are the right roles coming to you now?

There are certain people who, they did one movie and, suddenly, that movie hadn’t come out yet but everyone had decided this person is a movie star, and they’re on the cover of four magazines before they have a movie that’s come out. They can get every movie before anyone has seen them actually be in anything.And I was never going to be one of those people. There are certainly worse things in the world, and there are bigger boulders to push up a hill, but I’m not sure that it’s ever going to change. And that would be fine if I got to do the kind of movies I’ve been able to do thus far, but at a certain point you start thinking about your future, and I don’t want to be 60 living just from one job to the next. Everyone thinks that movie stars, anyone in a movie, is rich, and it’s just not the case anymore. That may have been the case at one point, but it’s definitely not now.